Perceptual-Motor Training on Motor Skills of Boys with Trainable Mental Retardation

Intellectual disability is one of the cognitive-motor abnormalities that happen during the developmental age period. It causes restrictions to different individual functions and usually emerges with a delay in motor and intellectual growth, low academic performance, and poor social and communicative skills. In children with intellectual disability, there is no appropriate relationship between cognition and motor during the process of development and particularly sensitive periods. Therefore, they acquire lower levels of basic motor skills among such children compared to normal individuals, and they carry out such skills in an immature way. Due to poor motor skills in such children and the importance of them, and because physical activities lead to physical health, and improvement in the individual’s intellectual performance, behavioral perception, feelings, and personality. The present study was aimed to examine the effect of cognitive-motor exercises on improvement in gross and fine motor skills among educable boys with intellectual disability.

A purposive sampling method was used to select 20 intellectually disable educable boys with an average age of 8.3±1.11 years and IQ of 39.14±6.84 from welfare center of Marivan (Kurdistan province, West of Iran). The pretest was done for all of the children. Afterward, they purposively divided into two groups (n=10); an intervention group, and a control group. Bruininks-Oseretsky test of motor proficiency was used to measure gross and fine motor skills. The intervention group carried out the cognitive-motor exercises for 24 sessions of 45 to 60 minutes, 3 times a week. After 24 sessions, both groups took a posttest. Non-parametric tests of Wilcoxon and Mann-Whitney U (SPSS 16.0) used to test the study’s hypotheses.

The results of the present study showed that the practice period had a significant effect on gross motor skills in the intervention group (running speed and agility, balance, two-way coordination, and strength) (p<0.05). The effect of the practice period; however, was not significant on fine motor skills (response speed, vision control, and speed and agility of the upper limb) (p>0.05).

From the results, it can be concluded that the training program used in the present study is suitable for improving motor skills in boys with reactive IQ and can be used as a training program by relevant centers.</div>